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Originally Posted by grant hutchison
Oh, and you're probably aware that 2:1 resonances can be either stable or unstable, depending on the relative orientations of the orbits, and relative positions of the planets. Is it possible you're setting up an unstable resonance as your starting point?
Grant Hutchison
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Probably. I just put them in circular orbits, which would probably produce an unstable resonance to begin with. Watching it over a period of time showed me that the advance of the conjunction point did slow a bit, as if it were going to stop and reverse. But then it picked up speed and continued forward. I take this to mean that it is almost locked into a resonance. Starting it out with some eccentricity for Saturn will probably lock it into the resonance. Then the longitude of conjunction would librate back and forth around a point. This is interesting because that means that it's not only the longitude of Jupiter & Saturn's conjunction that causes instability to Uranus & Neptune, but the longitudes of the places that the conjunction never visits.
Thanks, Grant. That hadn't occured to me.
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Here's an animation of Jupiter and Saturn, in circular orbits at 2:1. This is not a rotating frame. It is a Kepler's pretzel centered on Jupiter. Rotating frames don't show much if the orbits are round.

Purple: Jupiter; Red: Sun; Yellow: Saturn
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This rotating frame animation isn't of Jupiter and Saturn, but of 2 hypothetical objects locked in a 2:1 resonance. But it serves to show qualitatively what is happening. If the resonance in the Jupiter & Saturn simulation did lock, the conjunction point would librate around a larger portion of the circle than this animation.

Yellow: Sun; Purple: Planet; Red: test particle with significant eccentricity